Next Unit of Computing (NUC) is a small-form-factor (SFF) PC designed by Intel and is based on soldered-on low-power Celeron, Pentium, i3, i5 and i7 CPUs. Its motherboard measures 4 × 4 inches (10.16 × 10.16 cm).

The barebone kits consist of the board, in a plastic case with a fan, an external power supply and VESA mounting plate. Intel does offer for sale just the NUC motherboards, which have a built-in CPU, although (as of 2013) the price of a NUC motherboard is very close to the corresponding cased kit; third-party cases for the NUC boards are also available.

NVMe

Tip: If supported by the NVMe and/or other devices connected to the PCIe-slot, you may want to enableNative ACPI OS PCIe Support in the Power section to allow power saving and possible cooling the device in idle.

Power management

Troubleshooting

Audio plug

The PulseAudio#Switch on connect module is buggy and in some cases might cause pulseaudio to stop playing audio when disconnecting the plug, until pulse is restarted. In this case, comment out the module:

/etc/pulse/default.pa

#load-module module-switch-on-port-available

TPM

NUC devices have TPM capabilites that are currently blocked due to a few bugs in tpm_crb[2][3]. 4.6 Kernel still has no solution for Haswell TPMs but a relevant patch is work in progress[4].

Poweroff

After issuing a shutdown, the NUC might remain in some state which isn't completely shut down, as indicated by a remaining blue power LED. In this case it's neccesary to power off the unit by holding the power button for a few seconds.

The workaround for this issue is to disable all wake-on-CIR (infrared sensor) options in the BIOS. In some cases it might be required to disable the CIR sensor completely to fix the issue.